Ayn Rand Quotes

667 Sourced Quotes

America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.

Ayn Rand
Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience.

Ayn Rand
It is a policeman's duty to retrieve stolen property and return it to its owners. But when robbery becomes the purpose of the law, and the policeman's duty becomes, not protection, but the plunder of property - then it is an outlaw who has to become a policeman.

Ayn Rand
It is fairly easy to grasp abstract moral principles; it can be very difficult to apply them to a given situation, particularly when it involves the moral character of another person..

Ayn Rand
That an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.

Ayn Rand
To discuss evil in a manner implying neutrality, is to sanction it.

Ayn Rand
Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he's honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he's great in the eyes of others.

Ayn Rand
A person who exists only for the sake of his loved one is not an independent entity, but a spiritual parasite. The love of a parasite is worth nothing.

Ayn Rand
Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it?

Ayn Rand
The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence—to protect his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to his own property and to the pursuit of his own happiness. Without property rights, no other rights are possible.

Ayn Rand
Every honest man lives for himself. Every man worth calling a man lives for himself. The one who doesn't - doesn't live at all.

Ayn Rand
We are one...alone...and only...and we love you who are one...alone...and only. We looked into each other's eyes and we knew the breath of a miracle had touched us, and fled, and left us groping vainly. And we felt torn, torn for some word we could not find.

Ayn Rand
You want to know what I like and dislike. I will answer you by paraphrasing Howard Roark in The Fountainhead: 'Don't ask me about my family, my childhood, my friends or my feelings. Ask me about the things I think.'

Ayn Rand
This was the great clarity of being beyond emotion, after the reward of having felt everything one could feel.

Ayn Rand
Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where the gun begins.

Ayn Rand
But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts.

Ayn Rand
It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust but to know.

Ayn Rand
To fear to face an issue is to believe that the worst is true.

Ayn Rand
It is fear that drives [the hippies] to seek the warmth, the protection, the safety of a herd. When they speak of merging themselves into a "greater whole," it is their fear that they hope to drown in the undemanding waves of unfastidious human bodies - and what they hope to fish out of that pool is the momentary illusion of an unearned personal significance.

Ayn Rand
Why no. I'm too conceited. If you want to call it that. I don't make comparisons. I never think of myself in relation to anyone else. I just refuse to measure myself as part of anything. I'm an utter egotist.

Ayn Rand
But I still wonder how it was possible, in those graceless years of transition, long ago, that men did not see whither they were going, and went on, in blindness and cowardice, to their fate. I wonder, for it is hard for me to conceive how men who knew the word "I," could give it up and not know what they lost. But such has been the story, for I have lived in the City of the damned, and I know what horror men permitted to be brought upon them.

Ayn Rand
Don't ever give up what you want in life. The struggle is worth it.

Ayn Rand
The mark of an honest man... is that he means what he says and knows what he means.

Ayn Rand
Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

Ayn Rand
If a man speculates on what 'society' should do for the poor, he accepts thereby the collectivist premise that men's lives belong to society and that he, as a member of society, has the right to dispose of them...that psychological confession reveals the enormity of the extent to which altruism erodes men's capacity to grasp the concept of rights or the value of an individual life.

Ayn Rand
Freedom, in a political context, means freedom from government coercion. It does not mean freedom from the landlord, from the employer, or freedom from the laws of nature which do not provide men with automatic prosperity. It means freedom from the coercive power of the state ' and nothing else

Ayn Rand
Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feeling with knowledge.

Ayn Rand
Indiscriminate tolerance and indiscriminate condemnation are not two opposites: they are two variants of the same evasion. To declare that everybody is white or everybody is black or everybody is neither white nor black, but gray, is not a moral judgment, but an escape from the responsibility of moral judgment.

Ayn Rand
It is too early to feel fear of the future when one is under 30, and too late after that. What I mean is that one must never allow fear to become one's permanent sense of life. The important thing is to prepare yourself intellectually to deal with whatever circumstances you may encounter, which requires that you define your values fully, clearly and rationally -- and never betray them.

Ayn Rand
Sacrifice does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious

Ayn Rand